Category Archives for Airlines.
Singapore Airlines offers very good award availability to its own members, but not very good availability to partners. I’ve written about excellent first class award space Los Angeles – Tokyo and great business class space Houston – Manchester.
If you want to fly long haul premium cabin awards with Singapore, you need to use Singapore’s own miles. Chase, American Express, and Citi points all transfer to Singapore Airlines Krisflyer.
One of the big mistakes people make booking awards is to assume that when you want to travel you go to your frequent flyer program’s website and enter where you’re flying from, where you’re going to, and you’ll be presented with your options.
If you go to the American Airlines website and say you want to go to Bangkok there will be no availability, ever. And that’s not because there’s no availability, although that’s what most people assume it means.
Thursday night’s American Airlines Raleigh – Washington National flight, AA5580, got out of hand.
Two women sitting next to each other on the Bombardier CRJ-700 regional jet got into each others’ personal space. One woman describing herself as “fat” says her seat opponent was unhappy she was spilling over into the next seat.
In January China flexed its muscles against Marriott at a time that the US President began making rumblings of a trade war. They shut down Marriott’s booking engines in the country. Marriott Marriott fired an hourly worker who rather innocuously ‘liked’ a tweet about Tiber and even removed a banned book from one of their hotels.
At the time I wrote that China would be cracking down on airlines, too. American’s website for instance listed Taiwan separately from China.
I wrote the other day that the draft FAA bill being debate by the House included criminalizing passenger speech. If you ‘verbally assault’ an airline employee, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to fly, but this law will raise the stakes with law enforcement too.
That’s not all that’s in the bill that passed the House and now moves on to the Senate.
Two years ago I shared a trick to dealing with a stinky lavatory. You wouldn’t think this would be a major problem in the grand scheme of things, but it is — both from a passenger experience perspective but also for airline operations. British Airways once had to turn around a Dubai flight because the lavatory smelled so bad.
The kosher meal chicken was flavorful, spicy even, and the smoked whitefish was tasty. The pineapple upside down cake dessert was excellent.
The Muslim meal chicken was the spiciest food I’ve had on a US airline in a very long time, but it wasn’t just heat it was a complex heat. The dessert was a butterscotch tart which was delicious.
American has to be spending more on their special meals than on their regular meals.
I’m paranoid about getting sick. With as much travel as I do there’s no good time for it. So I absolutely hate when I’m stuck next to a passenger that’s coughing or sniffling or I encounter a lounge staff member with the flu handling food.
I want people to change their flights when they are sick. But mistakes are made when they’re forced to do it.
In this morning’s American Airlines earnings call one airline analyst asked, “Why not offer consumers a fair rate [for sale of miles]?” He was seeing some of the high prices charged for miles, and couldn’t imagine anyone taking advantage of those offers. In fact American does sell miles for a lot less than they used to, very regularly. This wasn’t mentioned in response.
Instead the airline talked about the loyalty program’s contribution to the business. But the underlying question really was, why not sacrifice margin for revenue growth?
On Sunday I wrote that Lufthansa first class awards had become bookable using partner miles. That’s significant because normally Lufthansa only makes first class award space available in advance to its own Miles & More members. Star Alliance partner frequent flyer programs can generally only book that space within 2 weeks of departure.
Now this has spread to San Francisco – Munich.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
